Norah Borges: "A Smaller, More Perfect World"

By Eamon McCarthy

Norah Borges (1901–98) was the sister of the celebrated Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. She first began producing art in Switzerland, where her family was trapped during the First World War, and travelled to Spain before returning to her native Argentina with her new styles of painting. In the 1920s, her work was published on the covers of important cultural magazines, but she is now largely forgotten. In her works, Borges created a world full of almost angelic figures – describing it as a smaller, more perfect world – mostly a serene space dominated by women. This book explores how Borges created that space and developed her own unique style of painting, studying the connections she made with the leading artists and writers of her time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781786836328

Book preview

NORAH BORGES

STUDIES IN VISUAL CULTURE

SERIES EDITORS

Margaret Topping

Queen’s University, Belfast

Rachael Langford

Cardiff University

Giuliana Pieri

Royal Holloway, University of London

EDITORIAL BOARD

Mieke Bal

University of Amsterdam

Paul Cooke

University of Leeds

Anne Freadman

The University of Melbourne

María Pilar Rodríguez

Universidad de Deusto

Eric Thau

University of Hawai’i at Manoa

available in series

Jean Andrews

Painting and Devotion in Golden Age Iberia: Luis de Morales (2020)

Jean Andrews, Jeremy Roe and Oliver Noble Wood (eds),

On Art and Painting: Vicente Carducho and Baroque Spain (2016)

Nathalie Aubert (ed.),

Proust and the Visual (2013)

Susan Harrow (ed.),

The Art of the Text: Visuality in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary and other media (2013)

Aimee Israel-Pelletier,

Rimbaud’s Impressionist Poetics: Vision and Visuality (2012)

STUDIES IN VISUAL CULTURE

Norah Borges

‘A Smaller, More Perfect World’

Eamon McCarthy

© Eamon McCarthy, 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3NS.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library CIP Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78683-630-4

e-ISBN 978-1-78683-632-8

The right of Eamon McCarthy to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: Pablo y Virginia (1927), oil on wood, 73x83cm. © Herederos de Norah Borges.

Cover design: Olwen Fowler

Contents

Acknowledgements

List of illustrations

Introduction

1A Style of One’s Own

2Finding an Appropriate (Argentine) Style

3Consolidating Styles between Argentina and Spain

4Creating a Perfect World

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Series editors’ preface

Studies in Visual Culture provides a forum for ground-breaking enquiry into visual-cultural production in its social, historical and cultural contexts. The series places particular emphasis on the exchanges, transactions and displacements that link Europe to wider global contexts across the visual-cultural field. The series seeks to promote critical engagement with visual media as ideological and cultural as well as aesthetic constructs, and foregrounds the relationship of visual cultures to other fields and discourses, including cultural history, literary production and criticism, philosophy, gender and sexuality research, journalism and media studies, migration and mobility studies, social sciences, and politics. The Studies in Visual Culture series thus focuses on exploring synergies and key debates between disciplines, concepts and theoretical approaches, and offers an exciting new arena for testing and extending disciplinary, theoretical and conceptual boundaries.

Acknowledgements

I have to begin with sincere thanks to Roberta Quance. Roberta first introduced me to Norah’s work and has always been so generous with her knowledge. I am deeply grateful to her for her support for my work and for continuing to share her ideas with me. I would never have been able to complete this project without her continued guidance.

I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Norah’s son, Miguel de Torre Borges, and her grandson, Fernando de Torre. Miguel has been so generous with his time. He welcomed me into his home many times and shared recollections and memories, as well as giving me access to images and material held by the family. I was also very fortunate to meet and chat with Miguel’s wife, Babo, who was the model for the painting on Plate 14. My deep thanks to both of them for welcoming me so warmly at all times. Without them, I would never have developed such a deep understanding of Norah’s life. Fernando has also very kindly shared his own research and I hope we can continue sharing our Norah-related discoveries for many years to come. I am particularly grateful to the family for allowing me to reproduce so many of Norah’s works in this book.

A project like this relies upon a support network of academic mentors and friends who know when to ask about it and when not to, as well as providing their unstinting support along the way. Many thanks to Isabel Torres, Nigel Harkness, Anne Holloway, Ricki O’Rawe, Jackie Clarke, Georgina Collins, Jordi Cornella, Elizabeth Geary-Keohane, Kirsty Gowling-Afchain, Greg Kerr, PJ Lennon, and Henriette Partzsch.

I was exceptionally lucky to be welcomed by a group of people in Argentina who had all published on Norah and who know her work so well. It has always been a great pleasure to spend time with Ana Martínez Quijano, May Lorenzo Alcalá, Patricia Artundo and Sergio Baur. I am grateful to all of them for their generosity to me. Particular thanks to Ana for all her help and support during my trips to Buenos Aires as well as for her invaluable assistance in finding the images for this text.

Many thanks to Alessia Zinnari, Matías Iesari and Jorge Cordonet for all their support with the images. I am also deeply grateful to Cheryl Hunston for her diligent work on the index.

I wish to thank all my friends and family for their unflagging support throughout this project.

Illustrations

Cover

Pablo y Virginia (1927), oil on wood, 73x83cm. © Herederos de Norah Borges.

Figure 1

‘Un cuadro sinóptico de la pintura’, Martín Fierro, 39 (1927), 2–3. © Herederos de Norah Borges.

Figure 2

La Verónica (1918), print, 25x30cm. © Herederos de Norah Borges.

Figure 3

Guiñoles sobre telón (c.1919), mixed media. © Herederos de Norah Borges.

Figure 4

El circo, Ultra, 1/1 (1921), cover. © Herederos de Norah Borges.

Figure 5

Buenos Aires, Sur, 1/1 (Summer 1931), unnumbered plate. © Herederos de Norah Borges.

Figure 6

Santa Rosa de Lima (c.1932), oil. © Herederos de Norah Borges.

Figure 7

Sirenitas (c.1932), oil. © Herederos de Norah Borges.

Figure 8

Sin título (1935). Published with Guillermo de Torre, ‘Para una estética de las Procesiones’, Saber Vivir, 2/9 (April 1941), 28–31 (29). © Herederos de Norah Borges.

Figure 9

Sin título, ilustración para ‘Casa Tomada’ de Julio Cortázar, Los Anales de Buenos Aires, 1/11 (1946), 13–18 (15). © Herederos de Norah Borges.

Figure 10

Sin título, ilustración para ‘Casa Tomada’ de Julio Cortázar, Los Anales de Buenos Aires, 1/11 (1946), 13–18 (17). © Herederos de Norah Borges.

Figure 11

Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel, trans. Ruth Simms (New York: New York Review of Books, 2003 (1968)), p. 15. © Herederos de Norah Borges.

Figure 12

Jorge Luis Borges, Adrogué (Adrogué: Ediciones Adrogué, 1977), title page. © Herederos de Norah Borges.

Figure 13

Jorge Luis Borges, Adrogué (Adrogué: Ediciones Adrogué, 1977), p. 40. © Herederos de Norah Borges.

Figure 14

Jorge Luis Borges, Adrogué (Adrogué: Ediciones Adrogué, 1977), p. 64. © Herederos de Norah Borges.

Plate 1

Buenos Aires, Prisma, 1 (1921), print. © Herederos de Norah Borges.

Plate 2

El herbario (1928), oil on canvas, 63x63 cm. © Herederos de Norah Borges.

Plate 3

Guillermo de Torre (1929), tempera on paper, 39x49 cm. © Herederos de Norah Borges.

Plate 4

El marinero y la sirena (1931), tempera on paper, 38x47 cm. © Herederos de Norah Borges.

Plate 5

Montevideo (1929), oil on wood, 46x48.5 cm. © Herederos de Norah Borges.

Plate 6

Recuerdo de Cádiz (1936), tempera and collage on paper, 41.5x51 cm. © Herederos de Norah Borges.

Plate 7

Adolfo Bioy Casares, La invención de Morel (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1940), cover illustration. © Herederos de Norah Borges.

Plate 8

Seis Ángeles (1931), oil on wood, 46x48.5 cm. © Herederos de Norah Borges.

Plate 9

La Alameda (1946), oil on canvas, 112x81 cm. © Herederos de Norah Borges.

Plate 10

El jacarandá (1962), tempera, 48x61 cm. Photo kindly provided by Matías Iesari. © Herederos de Norah Borges.

Plate 11

La danza (1960), tempera. © Herederos de Norah Borges.

Plate 12

Concierto en el Balcón (1980), oil, 80x60 cm. © Herederos de Norah Borges.

Plate 13

La quinta rosada (1976), tempera. © Herederos de Norah Borges.

Plate 14

Las quintas (1965), oil, 80x100 cm. © Herederos de Norah Borges.

Plate 15

Adolescencia (1941), oil. © Herederos de Norah Borges.

Plate 16

Encuentro en el paraíso (1980), oil, 72x85 cm. © Herederos de Norah Borges.

Introduction

Pocos casos de tan exquisita feminidad como el de Norah Borges. Por eso prefiere luchar con el material más leve, más dócil.¹

Norah Borges (1901–98), the younger sister of Jorge Luis Borges, and one of the earliest female avant-gardists, emerged as the ‘graphic voice of ultraísmo’ in Spain and was a key figure in the introduction of avant-garde styles to Argentina.² During Spain’s Second Republic she was fully integrated into Spanish cultural circles. On both sides of the Atlantic she was sought after as illustrator for more than eighty books. Over the course of her career, she published critical reviews, wrote poetry and was imprisoned for her part in an anti-Peronist political protest. Yet, she is one of the most neglected of Argentina’s modern artists. This book will trace, in chronological fashion, the evolving styles of her work and her conscious creation of what she described in 1927 as a ‘mundo pequeño y más perfecto’.³ This phrase will underpin the entire study and is at the heart of my approach to Norah’s works. In the examination of Norah’s own personal style and her development as an artist, I will remain cognisant of Griselda Pollock’s recommendation that ‘feminist interventions [in the analysis of visual arts] demand recognition of gender power relations, making visible the mechanisms of male power, the social construction of sexual difference and the role of cultural representations in that construction’.⁴ Consideration will be given to both the impact of her gender and prevailing notions about gender on the development and reception of her work. My focus, however, will be on her changing styles and artistic practices, which are framed by the environments in which she was working. This study will explore Norah’s travels and how time spent in Switzerland and Spain, as well as her relationship with Buenos Aires, influenced changes to her style. Throughout her life and in each of these environments, she experienced very different attitudes to sexual difference, and through the figures in her paintings she mediates a position for her subjects and herself as a woman artist, always taking care to appear not to trespass upon the purportedly male territory of cultural production.

Women in Norah’s Works

Women are the subject of the vast majority of Norah’s drawings, paintings and illustrations for books. The female figures she portrays exhibit traits that might be labelled as feminine in a binary understanding of the term. Hélène Cixous argues that women are identified, among other things, with passivity, and the figures in Norah’s paintings certainly embody this stereotype.⁵ However, the women depicted in her works are not a straightforward representation of the ángel del hogar, which Susan Kirkpatrick notes was ‘incansablemente representado en novelas, manuales de conducta y revistas femeninas como un ser abnegado entregado a la tarea de atender las necesidades físicas y emocionales de hombres y niños’.⁶ Whilst many of her figures, particularly images of the Virgin and Child, do seem to overlap with aspects of this description, other more active religious figures such as Veronica or the repeated depictions of peasant women bring Norah’s figures closer to Fray Luis’s perfecta casada, a woman who is ‘an efficient, industrious albeit unequal business partner to her upper-class husband’ and whose roots can be traced back to the women of the Bible.⁷ Neither of these identities represent a radically feminist position, yet the resistance to the dominant stereotype of femininity as wholly passive embodied in the ángel del hogar, and the ability to interpret some of her works as a critique of the subject positions of the women she depicts, means that Norah’s works show the difficulties faced by women who were trying to find a balance between new freedoms and older constructions of femininity in the early twentieth century. This line of my argument is influenced by Naomi Schor’s assertion that, according to Irigaray, ‘the goal is for women to achieve subjectivity without merging tracelessly into the putative indifference of the shifter’.⁸ Throughout this study, I will show that the studied perfection of the world seen by the viewer in Norah’s work is a complex creation concerned almost exclusively with women’s subjectivity, and that the trace left by her work has not yet received the critical attention it merits.

As Quance and, following her, Nelson and Lorenzo Alcalá have noted in relation to Norah’s work, the particular image of femininity she invokes may best be understood through Joan Rivière’s 1929 essay, ‘Womanliness as a masquerade’.⁹ In her article, Rivière argues that women involved in areas considered traditionally masculine, such as arts and letters, may accentuate traits traditionally perceived as feminine in order to ‘avert anxiety and the retribution feared from men’.¹⁰ The psychoanalytic case studies Rivière cites may be applied to the passive aesthetic Norah cultivates, and can be linked directly to the very demure form of femininity seen in her works. The creation of such images creates a paradoxical position, which arises from the unerring use of such apparently passive images in the active cultural medium of painting. In Norah’s images, her viewer sees attributes considered typically feminine, yet she radicalises these, or frees them from the traditional constraints that limit women’s participation in society on an equal basis to men by the very fact that these are images executed by a woman artist. The perceived femininity of her figures becomes anything but passive because of its overwhelming and constant presence in works that are rooted in her own theoretical position outlined in her writings. Neither this unique aesthetic nor the engagement with femininity emerges spontaneously but may be better understood through a consideration of Norah’s artistic education and the seismic shifts in the visual arts and women’s roles in society that were taking place in the early twentieth century.

Negotiating the Cultural and Artistic Spheres

Norah’s formal artistic education began in 1915 at the École des Beaux-Arts in Geneva. The radical questioning of the nature of painting and the visual arts had reached its apotheosis in the form of the European avant-garde movements, and the young Norah Borges was beginning her artistic career at a time that allowed her to experiment with many modes of representation before developing her characteristic style. While the early decades of the twentieth century are often cited as the most progressive for women’s rights, it would be naïve to think that Norah’s development as an artist is not influenced by prevailing (and often outdated) ideas surrounding women and femininity. Her introduction to avant-garde aesthetics and her integration into the Spanish avant-garde were marked by outmoded attitudes to gender. There is no overarching set of values that unite the various movements captured under the umbrella term ‘historical avant-garde’, but two features – the goal to challenge and the tendency towards iconoclasm – shared by many movements may be perceived as masculine in that the activity integral to them is associated with masculinity in the age-old binary understanding of the term. Furthermore, the space of the city, a crucial image for avant-garde poets and artists, is coded as masculine, whether in the guise of Baudelaire’s flâneur, the Eiffel Tower or Madrid’s viaduct. It is also a space that was only just opening up to women, and even then only in a very limited way.

The identification of the period as masculine does not exclude the woman artist per se; however, it marginalises her experiences and her contributions unless she mirrors the men’s themes. Alessandra Comini’s conclusions that women artists of the Expressionist movement are often overlooked because of ‘our discipline’s standard definition of Expressionism – a definition which seems to take relish in contemplating and recontemplating the revolt of the sons against the fathers‘ might well be applied more generally to the questioning of aesthetics at this time.¹¹ Carol Duncan goes further than this, and notes that many paintings of female subjects produced during the avant-garde ‘speak not of universal aspirations but of the fantasies and fears of middle-class men living in a changing world’.¹² Through an analysis of avant-garde groups and the art they produced, it becomes clear that both women’s historical position within such groups and the representation of women in vanguard art produced by men undermine the position of the woman artist.

The marginalisation of women’s experiences during this period, a time in which new possibilities were opening up for women, creates its own tensions and difficulties. Gilbert and Gubar note:

female writers have often felt even more imperilled than men did by the sexual combat in which they were obliged to engage. For, as is so frequently the case in the history of sex relations, men view the smallest female steps towards autonomy as threatening strides that will strip them of all authority, while women respond to such anxious reaction-formations with a nervous sense of guilt and a paradoxical sense of vulnerability.¹³

The greater public presence of women in the Modernist period obviously provided a framework within which women could work in the field of culture, but being among the first to work publicly in this area may lead to feelings of trepidation. However, alongside such apprehension, Gilbert and Gubar state that ‘at the same time, some women, particularly in the Modernist period, have felt empowered by every advance towards cultural centrality, so that the female half of the dialogue is considerably more complicated than the male’.¹⁴ What Gilbert and Gubar identify are the paradoxical effects of societal change. Women writers and artists – like Norah – were able to work more openly than women before them had, yet this freedom provoked feelings of anxiety and vulnerability about entering new territory. As I will show, in Norah’s case this was exacerbated by the more traditional values upheld by her family and the ways her work was first discussed by her earliest critics.¹⁵ Indeed, this sense of anxiety may well have marked her practice as an artist throughout her entire career and may help to explain her reticence around promoting her work.

While it is unusual to suggest that a time period or artistic movement is gendered, Ortega y Gasset, in his 1923 essay ‘El tema de nuestro tiempo’, argues for a gendered theory of generations, stating that ‘se insinúa, en efecto, una pendulación en la historia de épocas sometidas al influjo predominante del varón a épocas subyugadas por la influencia femenina’.¹⁶ In relation to the Modernist movement more generally, Rita Felski underlines that ‘critics have drawn attention to a machismo aesthetic characterising the work of male modernists that is predicated upon an exclusion of everything associated with the feminine’.¹⁷ This exclusion of the feminine generally present in Modernism was first asserted as a feature of the Spanish vanguard by Ortega y Gasset in ‘La deshumanización del arte’, published in 1925, where he states: ‘El cariz que en todos los órdenes va tomando la existencia europea anuncia un tiempo de varonía y juventud. La mujer y el viejo tienen que ceder durante un período el gobierno de la vida a los muchachos.’¹⁸ Thus, Norah worked within a movement that has been gendered masculine. Lorenzo Alcalá insinuates that Norah had carefully to negotiate her place within this masculine arena by perhaps downplaying or masking her femininity.¹⁹ However, Norah’s central role in the Spanish vanguard and the fact that her work ‘helped to establish the graphic identity of ultraísmo in Spain and defined its plastic personality in Buenos Aires’ suggest that her avant-garde work was more than a mask.²⁰ Suleiman’s work on avant-garde women writers offers a framework to help think about Norah’s position in relation to culture and avant-garde movements, which she notes ‘have wilfully chosen their marginal position […] whereas women have more often than not been relegated to the margins’.²¹ I want to suggest here that this double marginalisation does not necessarily have a negative effect on her work; instead, the marginal, the space that is neither central nor to which attention is called, is exactly what allows Norah to paint as she pleases. In light of this, I want to think of Norah’s position in the historical avant-garde as that of ‘insider-outsider’, to borrow Alice Gambrell’s term for ‘women intellectuals who were affiliated in this peculiarly ambiguous way with a range of metropolitan formations’.²² Gambrell identifies these women as sitting ‘both "within and against" dominant theoretical vocabularies’.²³ Norah has carefully learned to negotiate a space for her work through her experiences, and this more ambiguous position helps to explain her tendency to borrow partially from a number of different movements and to integrate them into what is ultimately her own aesthetic. This liminal relationship with avant-garde groups allows Norah to remain within particular social and cultural gendered norms, yet also gives her the freedom to continue working as a woman artist.

Criticism, Exhibitions and Shifting Styles

In contrast to her brother’s much-studied works, Norah’s work has received scant critical attention. Her avant-garde contemporaries wrote brief articles about her work and hailed her ‘nuestra pintora’, but they feminised her work and drew direct parallels between her own personality and her subjects.²⁴ This initial interest was followed by a monograph in 1945 written by Ramón Gómez de la Serna.²⁵ More recent critical interest in Norah’s work begins with Daniel Nelson’s doctoral thesis and Patricia Artundo’s dissertation, both completed in 1989, with Artundo’s piece forming the basis for her ground-breaking 1994 study of Norah’s early graphic work.²⁶ In 2009, two substantial studies were added to the growing body of literature on Norah Borges’s work. Roberta Quance and Fiona Mackintosh edited a special edition of the journal Romance Studies; while in Argentina, May Lorenzo Alcalá published her monograph, Norah Borges: La vanguardia enmascarada. Much of the critical material published to date focuses on Norah’s avant-garde works or her illustrations, and this study extends these by approaching her entire body of work as an organic whole, with an emphasis on the links between her avant-garde production and her later works.

The relatively scarce critical attention her artistic output has attracted to date is mirrored by a lack of exhibitions. Artundo lists a series of important solo and group exhibitions in which Norah’s work was included through the 1920s and 1930s.²⁷ After this period, there have only been a few exhibitions dedicated exclusively to her work and, occasionally, one or two of her paintings have been included in larger exhibitions.²⁸ There have been two major retrospectives of her work to date: the first was curated by Ana Martínez Quijano in 1996 in the Centro Cultural Borges, and the second took place in late 2019 in the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes curated by Sergio Baur.²⁹ Norah’s work has also been included in a few exhibitions in Spain focusing on avant-garde art, where the spotlight is on her contribution to the Spanish avant-garde.³⁰ In 2006 an exhibition curated by May Lorenzo Alcalá and Sergio Baur focused on her contributions to the European and Latin American avant-gardes.³¹ There is a growing awareness of her central position in avant-garde art, and MALBA (Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires) has now acquired a book jacket for Hélices by Guillermo de Torre, hand-painted by Norah.³² There is no definitive catalogue of Norah’s work, and the catalogues produced for the exhibitions mentioned above are partial, which has further marginalised her work in the context of both museums and criticism.

The lack of attention to Norah’s images may be due in part to the feminisation of the artist and her paintings in writings about her works. Norah’s earliest critics, or rather fellow contributors to the avant-garde, firmly categorise her work as feminine and make links between her own personality and the world she depicts. They emphasise the ‘continuidad orgánica’ between the artist, her works and the woman.³³ They first stress the fact she is a woman artist and go on to suggest that her work is painted by ‘intuición’.³⁴ They very deliberately read the artist into her work, which they describe as ‘dócil’, naïve or even childlike.³⁵ Pollock notes that such stereotyping ‘operates as a necessary term of difference, the foil against which a never-acknowledged masculine privilege in art can be maintained’.³⁶ The careful delineation of Norah and her work continues in this vein in the 1940s, notably in Gómez de la Serna’s monograph in which he focuses on her personality and her relationships with her brother Jorge Luis and her husband Guillermo de Torre rather than her art.³⁷ The careful construction by others of a specific socio-cultural position for Norah undermines the complexity of a body of work that adheres to a carefully considered aesthetic and works within its own intricate fund of imagery.

Her future husband Guillermo de Torre contributes to this feminisation of Norah and her work. His first article on her, ‘El arte candoroso y torturado de Norah Borges’, emphasises the naïve style of this ‘pintora novísima’.³⁸ In this piece, he begins to align her with a series of women artists in his suggestion that she coordinates ‘su obra con la de otras simpáticas figuras femeninas de avanzada’.³⁹ Among the artists he lists, the names Marie Laurencin, Irène Lagut and Nathalie de Gontcharowa (sic) stand out as artists Norah would later include in her own ‘Un cuadro sinóptico de la pintura’.⁴⁰ The idea that Norah is ‘dotada de una iridiscente sensibilidad femínea’, a phrase used by Torre in his second article, and reprinted in slightly different forms at least three times, provides an effective summary of the critical approach to Norah Borges and her work by her contemporaries.⁴¹ Lorenzo Alcalá suggests that, as well as contributing to the process of marking Norah as a feminine artist, Torre’s removal of all but two references to her in the second edition of his seminal Literaturas europeas de vanguardia published in 1965 indicates that ‘cuando ya era su marido, quiso echar un manto de olvido sobre aquella etapa [ultraísta] de su mujer, aunque en su momento usara la publicación de la primera versión del libro para lisonjearla’.⁴² Alcalá’s interpretation of Torre’s actions is undoubtedly grounded in his uncritical marking of Norah’s work as feminine. Of course, Torre’s erasure of Norah from the second edition of his book may also be influenced by her retreat from an avant-garde aesthetic in the 1920s and the lack of critical interest in the artist and her works.

The stylistic shifts in her work also makes it difficult for art historians attempting to create a chronology of art movements or influences to place Norah within a clearly defined artistic or historical context. She develops her own style based on her experience of the avant-garde and does not follow later movements in the same ways as other artists. She has her own unique artistic vision, which does not fit into a homogeneous category. This is reflected in the substantial Historia General del Arte en la Argentina, in which Norah appears in a group labelled ‘aislados’ who work under ‘tendencias dispersas’.⁴³ In other books she is placed alongside Gómez Cornet, Emilio Pettoruti and Xul Solar in a category of artists who were educated in the European avant-gardes and then returned to Argentina. However, it is Emilio Pettoruti and Xul Solar who are